Can online reviews be trusted?

Can a company fake Google reviews?

Is it possible for a company to fake Google reviews? If so, how can I tell if they did it? I recently did a search on this very topic. I've noticed that all the search results for "faked google reviews" show that there is an algorithm that looks for "fake" Google reviews. So far, I haven't been able to find any concrete proof of this, but I found a lot of anecdotal evidence that some companies are "faking" their reviews.

You can actually see a few "fake" reviews in your search results, eg: "Golf is a game you can play when you want to relax or have fun." - Review by Mike "Very good quality product, very friendly customer service and a very fast delivery service" - Review by Sam. "I got a good experience with my order. The company will provide it well before the deadline." - Review by Eric
It's very easy to find "fake" reviews. If a reviewer has a negative review, you'll get plenty of positive reviews from people who love the product. If a reviewer has a positive review, you'll get negative reviews from people who hate the product. If you search on Google for the name of the product, you can see this. For example, if I search for "Krispy Kreme doughnuts", I get a bunch of positive reviews, because people really like the product. If I search for "Krispy Kreme doughnuts", I get a bunch of negative reviews, because people really don't like the product. Searching for "google reviews" is no different.

You can also find reviews that look like they're fakes on websites like Amazon, etc. If you look at the reviews, they look very different than what you'd expect from a real reviewer. For example, I'm looking at Amazon reviews for my new Kindle. If I look at the Amazon reviews for books, they're very short and lack any useful information. But if I look at the Amazon reviews for the Kindle, they're very long and contain lots of useful information, like the following:

"I got a good experience with my order." - Review by Eric "This book was a good read. I learned a lot.

Can online reviews be trusted?

So the New York Times has a little article that highlights the fact that some online reviews are not only biased, but may actually be a factor in deciding where you'll buy stuff. Some reviewers have a financial stake in the products they are reviewing.

I was initially amused by the idea that people might be able to make money off of negative reviews, until I realized this could happen quite easily. Now, to be fair, I have seen this happen - it is not something I approve of, but I have seen it. The issue is what happens if you are a company that creates a product or service, but do not want to pay for a review? I'm betting that it can easily happen. But then the question arises: how can an online review be trusted?

It does raise a question about how reviews should be judged. Do they need to be balanced? How do you handle things like Amazon's one-star reviews? Should there be some sort of requirement for at least 10 or 20 reviews before something can be considered as a review? I don't have the answers, but I'm sure we're all interested to hear your thoughts on it. The main problem I have with these people is they aren't going to give any honest opinions about someone else's work unless it's in their interests to do so. And that's fine, it's just not fair for the author of the product.

This doesn't necessarily mean that if a review comes from a source that works with the brand that it won't be honest. So if we don't make it worth their while to give honest reviews and they hate a particular brand and find out that by getting paid for reviews they will be much happier working with that brand, the answer is simple - they're not going to do it.

That's the problem I have with the concept - this would never happen in a real world review because of the possibility of retribution for the authors. Not because the author of a review wants to hurt a company and their colleagues, but because they are being rewarded if they do a review.

If someone is giving a positive review and getting paid for it they're not going to give a fair review and a lot of people would be out of work. Even if they were giving fair reviews, what good would that do for the product or service they reviewed?

Can a review be fake?

What happens to a reviewer if there's no truth behind the opinion? What happens when reviewers are being reviewed?

Those questions may seem a bit odd when asked, and yet they're important matters. A new book is coming out soon in which the author argues that "everything written on the Internet is wrong." One can't help but think that the opposite is true, but we'll save that topic for later.

One of our friends in the business has a very particular line of work that he's always maintained is completely honest and transparent. He's also worked very hard for years at gaining legitimacy in an industry he believes has lost its moral compass. Now he's having real trouble standing up to accusations of being a fraud. And that's not because there's not a conspiracy of some sort behind those allegations; it's simply because this is one person who seems to be so good at his job he is, in a manner of speaking, immune from review. How does that happen? We can all agree that reviews are subjective. Yet the fact remains that reviewers have integrity, and we can tell who wrote reviews we trust. There is a "truth" about these experiences that can't be replicated.

That's the big concept here. When someone says their review came from xxx of xyz, if you ask "who wrote it?", you can take that person at their word. You cannot do the same with some "review site" where the reviewer is "reviewed". This is where the integrity issue comes in. What about the fact that any particular review might be a fake? Should we just accept the words of a fake review? It doesn't make sense to me.

What do you do when you don't want the honesty of someone's word but you know the integrity isn't there? Well, many reviews will just flat out lie. They'll say things about books that aren't true, make statements about what is or isn't good that aren't true, and basically anything else if the person writing it wants to win some sort of contest or sell something (because the reader cares that they like a book) or just make money from the article. For those reasons alone, I'm going to say that 99% of all reviews are either lies or made-up bullshit. And in that world, we end up with the following scenario: A "reviewer" writes a review on a book X for book Y.